Maiden Voyage No. 2

With a deep tooted farewell, the French Line's rebuilt Liberté last week nosed out of Le Havre into a Channel rainstorm and headed for New York. The "maiden voyage" of the world's third biggest liner had been delayed six hours by a last-minute protest strike of the ship's officers for a pay raise. Aboard the 49,850-ton, 936-ft. Liberté were Actress Irene Dunne, TV Star Jack Carter, French Line's President Jean Marie and 1,317 other passengers, few of whom could see any signs that the Liberte had once been the North German Lloyd's proud Europa.

The interior of the ship had been almost completely rebuilt. Passenger capacity had been cut from 2,200 to 1.513 to provide larger cabins and airy, well-lighted public rooms. Among the new features: a blossom-stuffed conservatory, a mural-lined children's dining-room, a small music salon where traveling musicians can practice. In the hold, to dine & wine the passengers on the six-day crossing, were eight tons of prime beef, 60,000 eggs, 5,000 bottles of champagne.

On the outside, the Liberté looked much the same as the Europa did in 1930, when she held the blue ribbon for the fastest (4 days 17 hrs. 6 min.) east-west transatlantic crossing. The climax to her German career came in 1939, when she slipped out of New York on Aug. 22, skipped her Channel stops, and scurried into Bremerhaven three days before war began. There Allied troops found her, in May 1945, filthy from neglect but undamaged by bombing. Used briefly as a U.S. Navy transport, she was returned to the Inter-Allied Reparation Agency because U.S. experts thought her unsuitable for peacetime passenger service. The French, whose passenger fleet had been hard hit during the war, were glad to get her.

While she was being put back in shape, the rechristened Liberté tore loose from her moorings in a storm, knocked a hole in her hull and sank on a mud bank. The French Line spent almost $20 million to raise and refurbish the ship. The sum was roughly equal to the Europa's original cost, but it was only about one-fourth the postwar cost of building such a vessel. The French Line hoped the sleek liner would earn back the money on the profitable Atlantic run.